Victorian Literature and Translation

Translating done in the Victorian era, as well as the later translation of Victorian literature out of English, has remarkable cultural, historical and theoretical significance. Until the early 2000s, scholarly thought about Victorian translation often focused on the debate in the 1850s between Matthew Arnold and Francis Newman (which took place in prefaces and lectures) about the best meter for translating Homer or on Edward FitzGerald’s widely read Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which FitzGerald published in 1859 and repeatedly revised. Since the first decade of the 21st century, however, Victorianist scholarship has benefited from generative new approaches to understanding translation in the era. While this scholarship addresses the Arnold–Newman debates and FitzGerald, it reaches beyond those subjects. It is characterized by dynamic interplay between theoretical understandings of translation and literary-historical scholarship on translation practices, including the circulation of translations. To gain insight into Victorian literature and translation, it helps to identify spheres of inquiry which, while intrinsically related, are also distinct. One can think about Victorian literature and translation by asking what translations into English were made in the era, by whom, and how, and what their effects were in Victorian Britain—cultural and linguistic consequences, that is, or effects upon translation practice. One can ask about the traveling of texts—how did literature move, and why? What Victorian literature was translated into other languages during the era or, on a longer timeline, after the nineteenth century? One can ask how Victorian translation practices and notions of translation contributed to later understandings of what translation may be. From a similarly historical perspective, one might ask how understandings of language, and how practices of language learning, shaped translation in the Victorian era and later. One can investigate contemporary theories of translation and experiment with how bringing those to the Victorian context illuminates dimensions of translation practice, or one can ask how dimensions of the 19th-century translation experience might contribute a new insight to contemporary theory. The link between Victorian translation and Victorian imperialism, inextricably involved in many of the preceding questions, also comprises a subject in its own right. Inquiring into the link between translating and the cultural politics of imperialism illuminates issues of power pertinent to translation more broadly, concerning such matters as the relation between more and less dominant languages and the publishing market for world literature.